I thought I was having major issues with my computer/hardware. I reinstalled all of my Adobe applications reformatted drives, reinstalled drivers, etc., but it turned out to be this plugin for AfterEffects that was the culprit.

I was able to preview a frame from a single clip composed of RAW .NEF images (7360x4912) adequately. At half resolution previews, each frame took approximately 6.50 seconds. This makes sense as the files/dimension/resolution are huge.

After I install NeatVideo, even if I don't use the plugin, to preview a single frame increases to ~9 seconds. Again, not even using the plugin and previewing time increases.

When I apply NeatVideo to the clip, previewing a single frame increases to ~45 seconds. I understand applying noise reduction to a clip increases encoding time, but this is a bit much. I have optimized NeatVideo to use 100% of my GPU and 11 cores.

Any ideas to increase these speeds? Am I missing something? My previous version of NeatVideo was much faster. ~9 seconds per frame.

That should not happen because if you do not use the effect (Reduce Noise v4), then it is not active and cannot slow things down. There may be something else in AE happening at that time.

Regarding the speed, please re-run the test and post the complete log from Optimize Settings window.

Also, if you want the final video to be processed in full resolution (7360x4912), please make sure you build the noise profile in that resolution as well. Do not use half-resolution frames to build the profile to be applied to full-resolution frames. The screenshot of the Preferences seems to indicate that you do use half-resolution frames (3680x2456). So the first thing to do is to sort out the resolution aspect.

Neat Video v4 with default settings should work with about the same speed as Neat Video v3. Please create a fresh new test project with some smaller resolution clip and check the speed of both versions of Neat Video on it. If you observe any significant difference, please let me know.